Good Morning My Confidants
It's Saturday morning and it's ugly and gray and I don't think there's going to be an sparkle of sunshine for my little get-together tomorrow, but you know what?
I'm feeling better every day and I'll sparkle plenty tomorrow! And I have a great XXXX to wear (it's a secret, pics tomorrow) and that will make me dazzle and anyone who knows me knows I NEVER want to just blend in.
Great news! Noah and I are at Urban Prairie Coffee and I'm drinking coffee! I didn't dare go black, not yet, so it's a latte and hey, what's wrong with that? And this one I'd honey lavender! OMGosh, it's wonderful.
You know it's funny, I posted a meme recently....
"We are not given a good life or a bad life. We are given life. And it's up to you to make it good or bad."
....and it stuck some people wrong. I was a little surprised. One person texted me about how someone had destroyed his and his family's life and was quite angry about my meme. He said it was condescending.
It made me a little sad, but I refused to stay there. Because you see this is something to talk about here all the time. And one of those biggest things is the Four Noble Truths. And the first Noble Truth is that life is dukka. That means that life can come with suffering. That's the way it is. We could injured. We get diseases. We lose people. We find out that we are going to die. Far less serious, we lose jobs, we lose a spouse to divorce, we lose a home that we really loved. Life comes with suffering.
But as many as the teachers that I read or follow teach, the real suffering comes with our thoughts concerning what has been thrown in our path. It's how we dwell on whatever that is.
When my 10-year marriage ended with a man that I thought was a knight in shining armor a man, who had a family who loved me dearly and whom I loved in return, a man who cheated on me ceaselessly shattering my heart, a man who became HIV+ and through some miracle did not infect me.....
All I could cry out to the world and the universe and everyone who will listen including a famous Lamar, was "How do I deal with this? How do I ever get over this? How do I stop feeling all this terrible pain? How do I get past this?"
And the answers? The answers were day by day. And the answers were what was I going to dwell on? Was I going to dwell on for the rest of my life about how this man did me wrong? There's a lot of people who do that. Their relationship will end and their 30s or 40s, and they live to 80 and never fall in love again because they say they don't ever want to deal with that pain again. And they convince themselves they don't need love. And maybe they don't. But most of the people that I've known in my life, and I just turned 64, so that's quite a few, we're miserable and unhappy and complaining about that ex for 20 or 30 or 40 years. Getting together with them for a coffee or a movie invariably meant at some point I was going to have to hear about the ex that did them wrong. Why I have a friend who split up with his first boyfriend 25 plus years ago, and he's never dated again.
That's what that meme about.
And you get past it, one day at a time, day by day. You find something to live for. You find things to laugh at. You get a new puppy or a new kitten. You move. You find new friends. You start going places that you and your ex never went to. And bit by bit you replace the old things that come with your ex (or you're lost job, or your lost home, whatever) and you replace it with something new, and then one day you discover that you have a whole new life.
And it is good as you want it to be.
A teacher said to me, think of it this way. You have a bucket full of muddy water, and you place it under a faucet that's barely dripping. And ... drip drip drip ... slowly, slowly ... drip drip drip ... the clear water replaces the money water.
A new mental equivalent. A new way to look at it. A new thought.
And with that I'm going to stop. Lecture over. It's Saturday morning. Saturday is for fun.
Have some fun today.
Love and Namasté,
BG "Gentle Ben" Thomas
